THE NESTORIAN CHURCH
The Ancient Christians Church of Mesopotamia
The Early Nestorians
Among those who had been present at the Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in
support of Nestorius was Ibas, presbyter (priest) and head of the
theological school of Edessa. In 435 he became bishop of Edessa and under
his influence the Nestorian teaching made considerable progress. On the
accusation of the so called orthodox he was deposed by the "Robber Synod"
of Ephesus, but at Chalcedon in 451 was pardoned on condition of
anathematizing both Nestorius and Eutyches and accepting the Tome of Leo,
the bishop of Rome. He had not, however, changed his views, and this was
generally recognized.
Meanwhile one of his pupils, Barsumas, had settled at Nisibis in Persian
territory where he became bishop in 435 and established a Nestorian
theological school. And when the Roman emperor in Constantinople
suppressed the school of Edessa ("the Athens of Syria") in AD 489, and
expelled its members, they traveled widely throughout Asia as eager and
successful missionaries of the Gospel of Christ.
In Persia their numbers and their zeal stimulated the old churches into vigor
and led to the founding of new ones. And as they were under ban from Rome
and out of communion with the Byzantine Church the Persian government
welcomed them as a political ally, though the religious opposition of the Magi
was still largely retained.
In their new environment the Nestorians abandoned some of the rigorous
forms of Christian asceticism, and at a synod held in 499 abolished clerical
celibacy even for bishops and went so far as to permit repeated marriages,
in striking contrast not only to orthodox custom but to the practice of
Aphraats at Edessa who had even advocated celibacy as a condition of
baptism. The liberty here granted to bishops was enjoyed as late as the 12th
century, but since then the Nestorian Church has assimilated its custom to
that of the Greek Church. That the ascetic ideal was by no means wholly
extinct is evident from the Book of Governors written by Thomas, bishop of
Marga, in 840 which bears witness to a Syrian monasticism founded by one
Awgin of Egyptian descent, who settled in Nisibis about AD 350, and lasting
uninterruptedly until the time of Thomas, though it had long been absorbed
in the great Nestorian movement that had annexed the church in
Mesopotamia.
The Nestorian Church in Eastern Syria and Persia was under the jurisdiction
of an archbishop (catholikos), who in 498 assumed the title "Patriarch of the
East" and had his seat at Seleucia/Ctesiphon on the Tigris River, a busy
trading city and a fitting center for the great area over which the
evangelizing activity of the Nestorians now extended. The church traced its
doctrines to Theodore of Mopsuestia rather than to Nestorius, whose name
at first they repudiated, not regarding themselves as having been
proselytized to any new teaching.
The Later Nestorians
In AD 608 Magian influence was so strong in Persia that the Christians were
persecuted and the office of catholikos was vacant for 20 years, being filled
again by Jesu-Jabus, during whose patriarchate the Arab Moslem invasion
overran Persia. The patriarch was able to secure from the Moslem caliph
permission for the Christians to practice their religion in return for tribute
money and this was afterwards remitted.
The Moslem ruler, Ibn Ali Talib, anxious to perpetuate their severance from
the Greek Orthodox Church and the Byzantine Empire, confirmed these
privileges by charter and in 762 the patriarchate was removed to Bagdad.
For five centuries the Nestorians were a recognized institution within the
territory conquered by Islam, though their treatment varied from kindly to
harsh. Biruni, a Moslem writer, who lived at Khiva circa A.D. 1 000, speaks of
the Nestorian Christians as comprising the majority of the population of
Syria, Iraq and Khorasan, and as superior to the Greek Orthodox Christians
in intellectual ability.
They agreed with Byzantines in observing Lent, Christmas and Epiphany, but
differed from them in the observance of all other feasts and fasts. The
Latin Church tried in vain during the Crusades to secure their submission to
Rome. The barbaric invasions of the 13th and 14th centuries fell with
crushing force on the Nestorians. In 1258 the Mongol Hulagu Khan took
Bagdad, and about AD 1400 Timur again seized and sacked the city. Though
the Nestorians were numerous, their moral influence and their church life
had greatly deteriorated. Those who escaped capture by Timur fled to the
mountains of Kurdistan, and the community that had played so large a part in
Mesopotamian history for a thousand years was thus shattered.
In 1552 they were further weakened by a large ecclesial split known as "the
Chaldean Church" arising out of a dispute about the succession to the
patriarchate. The discontented appealed to Rome, and the pope (Julius III.)
consecrated the Chaldean catholikos. The Chaldeans are now chiefly found in
rural districts east of the Tigris River. They have a see at Bagdad and a
monastery, Rabban Hormuz,) and are called by those Syrian Christians who
have resisted the papal overtures, Maghlabin (" the conquered").
Other attempts during the 16th century to promote union between the
Nestorians and Rome proved fruitless, but the Roman Catholic Church has
never ceased in its efforts to absorb this ancient community. The Jacobite
or Syrian Monophysite Church who, like the Nestorians, diverged from the
Byzantine Church, but did so in an exactly opposite direction. Like the
Nestorians they were great missionaries, and up to the 7th century, and
again in the 12th and 13th, produced the bulk of Syriac literature. The chief
Nestorian authors were in the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries: Babbai the elder
and Isho-yabh of Gedhala, commentators; Sandona, who wrote on the
monastic life; Abraham the Lame, a devotional and penitential writer;
Dionysius of Tell Mahre, whose Annals are important; and Thomas of Marga.
In the 14th century there were Abdh-isho bar Berikha (d. 1318) the author
of a theological treatise Marganitha (" the Pearl"), 1298, and the Paradise of
Eden, a collection of 50 theological poems.
The Nestorian Missionary Enterprise
The combined hostility of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Byzantine
Empire drove the Nestorians into exile, but they went much further than
was needed simply to secure immunity from persecution. They demonstrated
a zeal for evangelization which resulted in the establishment of their
influence throughout Asia, as is seen from the bishoprics (dioceses) founded
not only in Syria, Armenia, Arabia and Persia, but at Halavan in Media, Mery
in Khorasan, Herat, Tashkent, Samarkand, Baluk, Kashgar, and even at
Kambaluk (Bejing) and Singan fu Hsi`en fu in China, and Kaljana and
Kranganore in India.
In 1265 they numbered 25 Asiatic provinces and over 70 dioceses. Mongolian
invasions and Moslem tyranny have, of course, long since swept away all
traces of many of these. The 400,000 Syrian Christians (“Christians of
Saint Thomas the Apostle”) who live in Malabar no doubt owe their origin to
Nestorian missionaries, the stories of the evangelization of India by the
Apostles Thomas and Bartholomew having no real historical foundation, and
the Indian activity of Pantaenus of Alexandria having proved fruitless, in
whatever part of India it may have been exercised.
The theology of the Indian Syrian Christians is of a Nestorian type, and
Cosmas Indicopleustes (6th century) puts us on the right track when he says
that the Christians whom he found in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Malabar had
come from Persia (probably as refugees from persecution, similar to the
later French Huguenots who fled to England and the Pilgrim Fathers who
fled to America).
Pahlavi inscriptions' found on crosses at St Thomas's Mount near Madras
and at Kottayam in Travancore, are evidence both of the antiquity of
Christianity in these places (7th or 8th century), and for the semipatripassianism (the apparent identification of all three persons of the
Trinity in the sufferer on the cross) which marked the Nestorian teaching.
In 745 Thomas of Kana brought a new teaching, "In punishment by the cross
(was) the suffering of this One; He who is the true Christ, and God alone,
and Guide ever pure," with a band of emigrants from Bagdad and Nineveh,
and possibly the name "Christians of Saint Thomas" arose from confusion
between this man and the first century apostle of Jesus. Other
reinforcements came from Persia in 822, but the Malabar church never
developed any intellectual vigor or missionary zeal. They had their own kings,
lived as a closed caste, and even imitated the Hindus in caste regulations of
food and avoidance of pollution.
In 1330 Pope John XXII. issued a bull appointing Jordanus, a French
Dominican, bishop of Quilon, and inviting the Nestorians to enter the Roman
Catholic Church. The invitation was declined, but in the 16th century the
Syrian Christians sought the help of the Portuguese settlers against
Mussulman oppression, only to find that before long they were subjected to
the fiercer perils of Jesuit antagonism and the Inquisition. The Syrians
submitted to Rome at the synod of Dampier in 1599, but it was a forced
submission, and in 1653 when the Portuguese arrested the Syrian bishop just
sent out by the Catholikos of Babylon, the rebellion broke out. The
renunciation was not quite thorough, one party adhering to the Roman
Church as Romo-Syrians, the others reverting wholly to Syrian usages and
forming today about three-fourths of the whole community.
In 1665 a curious thing happened. Gregory, the Jacobite metropolitan of
Jerusalem, visited Malabar, and, as the people had no consecrated bishop at
the time, he consecrated Mar Thomas, who had been filling the office at the
people's request, and remained in the country jointly administering the
affairs of the Church with Thomas. Thus the Nestorian Church in India,
voluntarily and with perfect indifference to theological dogmas, passed
under Jacobite rule, and when early in the 18th century, Mar (Siant) Gabriel,
a Nestorian bishop, came to Malabar, he had a cool reception, and could only
detach a small following of Syrians whom he brought back to the old
Nestorianism. The approaches of the Anglican Church through the Church
Missionary Society in the first part of the 19th century were politely
repelled. On the death of the bishop Mar (Saint) Athanasius Matthew in
1877, litigation began as to his successor; it lasted ten years, and the
decision (since reversed) was given against the party that held by the
Nestorian connection and the habitual autonomy of the Malabar church in
favor of the supremacy of the Jacobite patriarch of Antioch. The great
need of the Indian Syrian church at that time was an educated ministry.
Early evidence of Nestorian missions in China is extant in the tablet
discovered in 1625 at Chang`an in the district of Hsi`en-fu, province of
Shensi. It commemorates "the introduction and propagation of the noble law
of Ta t'sin in the Middle Kingdom," and beneath an incised cross sets out in
Chinese and Syriac an abstract of Christian doctrine and the course of a
Syrian mission in China beginning with the favorable reception of the
Nestorian Christian missionary, Olopan, who came from Judaea in AD 636.
For two generations the little cause prospered, and again after persecutions
in 699 and 813.
Later on a second mission arrived, many churches were built and several
Chinese emperors patronized the faith. This evidence is confirmed by (a) the
canon of Theodore of Edessa (AD 800) allowing metropolitans of China, India
and other distant lands to send their reports to the Catholikos every six
years; (b) the edict of Wu Tsung destroying Buddhist monasteries and
ordering 300 foreign priests to return to the secular life that the customs
of the empire might be uniform; (c) two 9th-century Arab travelers, one of
whom, Ibn Wahhab, discussed the contents of the Bible with the emperor;
(d) and the discovery in 1725 of a Syrian manuscript containing Christian
liturgical hymns and a portion of the Old Testament.
In the 10th century the Nestorians introduced Christianity into the
territory of the Tartars; in 1274 Marco Polo saw two of their churches. The
legend of Prester John is based on the idea of the conversion of a Mongol
tribe, the Karith, whose chieftain Ung Khan at baptism received the title
Malek Juchana (King John). And there came to light a manuscript of the 9th
or 10th century in Sogdianese, an Indo-Iranian language spoken in the northeast of Asia, which shows that the Nestorians had translated the New
Testament into that language and had taught the natives the alphabet and
Christian doctrine. Their activity may well be said to have covered the
continent.
Their campaign was one of deliberate expansion, one of the greatest ever
planned by Christian missionaries. Marco Polo is witness that there were
Nestorian churches all along the trade routes from Bagdad to Bejing. The
Nestorians or East Syrians (Surayi) of Turkey and Persia as late as the early
twentieth century inhabited a district bounded by Lake Urmia, or Urumia, on
the east, stretching westwards into Kurdistan, to Mosul on the south, and
nearly as far as Van on the north. They were divided into the Persian
Nestorians of the plain of Azerbaijan, and the Turkish Nestorians,
inhabiting chiefly the sanjak of Hakkiari in the vilayet of Van, who were
subdivided into the Rayat or subject, and the Ashiret or tribal, the latter
being semi-independent in their mountain fastnesses. Together they formed
a church and a nation, they had allegiance to their hereditary patriarch, Mar
Shimun, Catholikos of the East, who resided at Qudshanis, a village about
7000 feet above sea-level, near the Kurdish town of Julamerk. It is only of
late years, under the influence of the different missions,that education,
ruined by centuries of persecution, had revived among the Nestorians; and,
even at that time, the mountain dwellers, cut off from the outer world, were
as a rule destitute of learning, and greatly resembled their neighbors, the
wild and uncivilized Kurds.
They are, however, extraordinarily tenacious of their ancient customs, and,
almost totally isolated from the rest of Christendom since the 5th century,
they afford an interesting study to the student of church history. Their
churches are rude buildings, dimly lighted and destitute of pictures or
images, save that of the Cross, which is treated with the deepest
veneration. The qanki, or sanctuary, is divided from the nave, by a solid wall,
pierced by a single doorway; it contains the altar, or madhb'kha (literaly, the
sacrificing place), and may be entered only by persons in holy orders who are
fasting. Here is celebrated the Eucharist (Qurbana, or the offering;
"corban"), by the priest (qasha), attended by his deacon (shamasha).
Vestments are worn only at the ministration of the sacraments; incense is
used invariably at the Eucharist and frequently at other services. There are
three liturgies - of the Holy Apostles, of Theodore and of Nestorius. The
first is quite free from Nestorian influence, dates from some remote period,
perhaps prior to AD 431, and is certainly the most ancient of those now in
use in Christendom; the other two, though early, are undoubtedly of later
date. The Nestorian canon of Scripture seems never to have been fully
determined, nor is the sacramental system rigidly defined. Nestorian
writers, however, generally reckon the mysteries as seven, i.e. Priesthood,
Oil of Unction, the Offering of the Body and Blood of Christ, Absolution,
The Holy Leaven, the Signation of the life-giving Cross. The "Holy Leaven" is
reputed to be a part of the original bread of the first Eucharist, brought by
Addai and Mari' and maintained ever since in the Church; it is used in the
confection of the Eucharistic wafers, which are rather thicker than those
typically used in the Western Church. Communion is given in both kinds, as
throughout the East; likewise, confirmation is administered directly after
baptism. Sacramental confession is enjoined, but has recently become
obsolete; prayers for the departed and invocation of saints form part of the
liturgies. The bishops are always celibates and are chosen from episcopal
families. The service-books were wholly in manuscript form until in the late
nineteenth century, the press of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Anglican
mission at Urmia issued the Takhsa containing the eucharistic liturgies,
baptismal office, and several other liturgical texts.
The Nestorians commemorate Nestorius as a saint, and invoke his aid and
that of his companions. They reject the Third Ecumenical Council, and
though showing the greatest devotion to the Blessed Virgin, deny her the
title of Theotokos, i.e. the mother or bearer of God. Their theological
teaching is misty and perplexing; They regard their earliest writings as
containing no error, and the hymns of their great St Ephrem, still sung in
their liturgies, are positively antagonistic to "Nestorianism"; their theology
dating from the schism is not so satisfactory. They attribute two Kiani, two
Qnumi and one Parsopa as the legendary founders of the Syrian Church.
Addai was supposed to be one of the Seventy of Luke 10: 1, and Mari his
disciple.
To say that the modern Nestorians are not definitely and firmly orthodox is
perhaps fairer than to charge them with being distinctly heretical.
Missions amongst the Nestorians
The peculiar circumstances, both ecclesiastical and temporal, of the
Nestorians have attracted much attention in western Christendom, and
various missionary enterprises amongst them have resulted.
The Roman Catholic Missions: In Turkey these consisted of the Dominican
mission, established at Mosul during the 18th century, and in Persia of the
French Lazarist mission, which sprang out of some schools established by a
French layman and scientific traveler, Eugene Bore, in 1838. At Bore's
entreaty the Propaganda sent the first Lazarist father to Persia in 1840.
The chief stations of the Lazarists are at Khosrova and Urmia. At the latter
place there is an orphanage under the superintendence of the Sisters of
Saint Vincent de Paul. The work of these missions was to extend and
consolidate that Romanized and partly Latinized offshoot of the Nestorians
known as the Uniat-Chaldean Church.
The American Presbyterian Mission: established in Persia in 1834-1835 by
the Rev. Justin Perkins and Dr A. Grant, comprised large buildings near
Urmia, a college and a hospital. The influence of this mission does not extend
much beyond the Turkish frontier, but it is strong in the Persian plains. The
original aim was to influence the old Nestorian Church rather than to set up
a new religious body, but the wide difference between Presbyterians and an
Oriental Church rendered the attempt abortive, and the result of the labors
of the Americans has been the establishment since 1862 of a Syrian
Protestant community in Persia, with some adherents in Turkey.
The Archbishop of Canterbury's Mission to the Assyrian Christians
This Anglican mission was promoted by Archbishop Tait, and finally
established by Archbishop Benson in 1886. Its aim is thus officially defined:
"To aid an existing Church, ... not to Anglicanize, ... not to change any
doctrines held by them which are not contrary to that faith which the Holy
Spirit, speaking through the Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church of
Christ, has taught us as necessary to be believed by all Christians, but to
strengthen an ancient Church, at the earnest request of the Catholikos, and
with the knowledge and blessing of the Patriarch of Antioch, one of the four
patriarchs of the Holy Orthodox Eastern Church, and occupant of the
Apostolic See from which the Church of the East revolted at the time of
Nestorius." This mission had its headquarters at Urmia, with a college for
candidates for holy orders.
The Russian Mission
One of the Nestorian bishops joined the Russian Orthodox Church in 1898,
and returned that same year with a small band of missionaries sent by the
Holy Synod of Russia. This mission enrolled a very large number of adherents
drawn from the old Church, the Protestant Nestorians, and the UniatChaldeans, but it can hardly be said to have commenced any active work,
although the Anglican mission withdrew from competition by closing its
schools in the dioceses occupied by the Russians at that time.